


for i am in a holiday humour

by Casylum



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-15 00:22:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13601580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casylum/pseuds/Casylum
Summary: It's February 13th. Of course Wynonna's got plans.





	for i am in a holiday humour

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scintilla10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scintilla10/gifts).



> >   
> ROSALIND: Come, woo me, woo me, for now I am in a holiday/humour and like enough to consent. What would you/say to me now, an I were your very very Rosalind?  
> ORLANDO: I would kiss before I spoke.  
> 
> 
> _As You Like It_ , Act IV, scene i
> 
> for [scintilla10](http://archiveofourown.org/users/scintilla10) as part of [Chocolate Box 2018](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/ChocolateBox2018).

Wynonna is late. Not, like, end-of-the-world late, but definitely riding the line of "If my sister weren't dating a sheriff's deputy I'd be pulled over for speeding into town" late.

It's a familiar place, cushy, full of half-held-onto memories of fishtailing out of the dirt roads up by the homestead and up to the regular asphalt of Route 10. Today, though, she'd like to skip the fishtailing, the maybe-probably police escort, and the nervous flop-sweat of needing to be somewhere else right-now-immediately.

But first: "Waves? Have you seen my shirt?"

"Which one?" A clang echoes from the kitchen; Waverley must be attempting some sort of cookery, which is a sure sign that Nicole's going to be over later.

"The one that makes me look like a Victorian governess, but in a hot way," Wynonna half-shouts back from the top of the stairs, leaning through the gap between the slant of the railing and the ceiling. She'd get closer, but Doc isn't in the house to hear, and she's already got her pants on. No need to endanger them in Waverley's Mystery Kitchen.

Besides, the point is rendered moot when Waverley wanders out of the kitchen, a towel clutched in her hand and a different towel thrown over her shoulder. She squints at where Wynonna's hanging over the rail. "Didn't a revenant eat that one?"

"Shit," Wynonna says, and then says it again when she accidentally bumps her head on the ceiling. "I liked that shirt. It was barely and begrudgingly classy, I respected that about it."

"You're not the only one," Waverley mutters, and then smiles guilelessly when Wynonna looks at her. "What? I'm not wrong, okay, other people, potentially of our acquaintance, also appreciated the sexually-liberated-governess thing."

"Thank you," Wynonna says, then: "but oh, God, it's just Mercedes—"

"So you say," Waverley cuts in, still smiling.

"—So I _know_ , and Shorty's is a public place anyway, I don't like what you're insinuating—"

"—I'm just saying, Doc's out of the house, and Rosita's on shift, and it's after hours—"

"—and all that is completely irrelevant, but what am I going to wear?" Wynonna doesn't wail like she's sixteen and about to go on her first ever date, but it's close.

Waverley considers her—and the other part of her clearly ill-fated outfit, a pair of high-waisted jeans with a double line of buttons running up the front—for a moment, towel twisting in her hands.

"You're wearing the black boots with that?" she asks, and Wynonna nods. "Then I say the greeny-blue one that makes you look like you're floating."

"Thank you," she says fervently, turning to go back up the stairs just as the smoke detector by the kitchen goes off and Waverley yelps, dropping a towel as she darts back inside.

~

When Wynonna comes back downstairs—all the way this time, and fully dressed—whatever Waverley is making is in the oven, a timer on the stove grimly ticking down. Waverley herself is sitting at the kitchen table, a stack of Black Badge folders by her elbow and a battered copy of _Shane_ open on her lap.

"Wishful thinking?" Wynonna asks, setting her boots down by an empty chair before going to find her jacket in the hall closet, scarf and gloves already scattered across the table in the front hall.

Waverley snorts. "The day there are no guns in Purgatory is the day the Earps move out of this hellhole."

"Doubt it." Wynonna shrugs on her black leather jacket—the one without fringe, she's going for 'classy, but will still kick ass if needed' tonight—and pulls her hair out from under the collar as she sits down to put on her boots. "We've got land up here, baby, and the rent's cheap. Why move?"

Waverley considers it for a moment, then says very precisely: "Our mail carrier would be a stranger."

~

Wynonna gets into downtown Purgatory—also known as the slightly closer together group of buildings around the vicinity of Shorty's—with a minimal amount of conscious traffic violations. Which, considering the fact that she hasn't honored either the stop sign at the head of the access road leading to the homestead, or the speed limit on Route 10 until she hits city limits since she was in high school, is an impressive feat, one that, in her opinion, deserves to be celebrated and lauded.

Plus, she's only ten minutes late for mundane reasons alone, which in this town is an achievement all by itself.

"Laurels," she mutters to herself, carefully stomp-stepping her way up the icy sidewalk, the lights of Shorty's a mere half a block away from where the truck is parked, "I should get laurels, maybe even a medal."

Wynonna crosses in front of the alleyway next to the building that houses the bar, shivering in the gust of wind funneling down the brief gap.

"Or, at the very least," she muses, pulling open the front door and stepping inside the wall of warmth that is the bar, "a round of drinks."

The bar's full tonight, Rosita hosting a full complement at the counter, and the tables on the floor in a jumble, half of them pushed together for larger parties, and the other half piled high with empties and purses while their occupants take turns dancing by the jukebox in the corner, near the pool tables.

The waitresses must hate that, Wynonna thinks, and then stops dead, scarf halfway off her neck, the fingers of one glove caught between her teeth. Back in the corner, where the lights are down lower and nobody's dancing, Doc's got Dolls bent over one of the pool tables, the lighter wash of his jeans contrasting with Dolls' darker ones as the smooth length of the pool cue slides between their fingers, which are tangled together on the worn felt.

Wynonna is...Wynonna is...

Frozen.

That's a good word for it, even if it doesn't quite explain the slowly spreading warmth tingling its way through her nerve endings, making her skin prickle. She can't quite bring herself to move, at least not consciously. Her glove comes off from the weight of her hand as her scarf slides the rest of the way off her neck, arms moving on autopilot as she stuffs them in her pockets. Her eyes, though, her eyes don't move from the back corner, the sound of a busy night at Shorty's fading to a dull roar.

Doc leans down to say something into Dolls' ear, and he laughs, teeth flashing bright in the low light. It's not until the pool cue shifts, and the crack of cue ball against a full rack echoes through the bar that she comes back to herself with a small shake.

"What the _fuck_ ," she says, almost reverently, as Doc lets Dolls stand up straight on his own, the two of them now standing side by side, considering the break. Doc is now pointing at the eight ball, looking like he's explaining something, and Dolls is nodding along like he's never hustled pool in his life, which is a goddamn lie, and—

"Wynonna!" That's Mercedes, sitting on the other side of the bar-top from where Doc and Dolls are playing, and looking surprisingly well for someone who went through what she did, and Wynonna's happy to see her, but—

"Why was that so hot?" she asks plaintively, to no one in particular, to the general air—

To Rosita apparently, because she answers with a snort. "Because you're hot for both of them, maybe? And I do mean—" she leans forward, ostensibly to grab some empties, but mostly, Wynonna thinks privately, to leer more effectively "— _both_ of them."

Wynonna would ask how Rosita knows what she'd been talking about, but then again, she'd been standing at the front of the bar with her glove in her mouth looking poleaxed for at least a solid three minutes, so, like, it probably hadn't been hard to guess. Which doesn't make Rosita right— _she is, though_ , says the voice in her head that sounds suspiciously like Waverley, _she so is_ —and even if she _were_ , it's not like Wynonna's going to do anything about it, ever, so there.

Except, even after she goes and sits down next to Mercedes and the two of them spend the next hour talking and catching up and bitching over the unreliable nature of skin grafts and healthcare in this economy—even compared with the prospect of being dead or revenant bait or American—Wynonna can't stop looking.

It's through a forest of bar glasses and bar patrons, the former distorting and the latter just straight up blocking, but Wynonna's still able to track the two of them through most a string of pool games, always just this side of too far into the other's personal space, to the point that she doesn't quite know what she and Mercedes have been talking about, but she knows the exact moment Dolls tells Doc he knows his way around a table, because it's the one where she suddenly finds that she can't sit still, can't be here—at the bar, with Mercedes next to her and Rosita laughing every time she catches her eye—anymore, can't watch this—whatever it is—from fifty feet away and pretend she's not—she isn't—

_Whatever_. About it.

Thankfully, Mercedes either has to go or senses that Wynonna isn't fully there, because she makes her excuses not long after that, the two of them doing the chi-chi hug-kiss-"see you around, bitch" in front of their stools that they never would have done prior to Mercedes' whole family being wrecked by a bunch of vengeful spirits and Mercedes herself having her face peeled off by one of them, and then Wynonna is left alone as Mercedes walks out the door in a swirl of falling snow.

It seems inevitable, almost, that after that she'd drift over to the pool tables, drop her coat on the table that's already holding Doc's hat and Dolls' half-drunk beer, the two of them stepping just far enough away from each other to give her the space to fit between them, Dolls handing her his cue.

She looks down at the worn green felt of the table, sees where it's smudged in places from the blue of the cue chalk, feels the heat of the two men standing at her sides, and has to fight back a smile.

"So," she says, tipping her head back so she can see both Doc and Dolls, their eyes warm in the dim light. She can smell Doc's cigars and the sharp spice of Dolls' cologne. "Stripes or solids, this round?"

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt for this was "slice of life in the Earp household", which I kind of took and expanded to mean "slice of life in the wider Earp friendship circuit". 
> 
> Treat the setting of this as a few months post-season two, except in a world where the pressing issues raised by the finale are pushed to the wayside for a moment. It's date night, you guys, even revenants respect date night.


End file.
